eBay recently announced a change to product pages for books, music, movies, and video games last week – a change that will likely give sellers yet another reason to complain. They are now featuring a box on product pages that highlight one supposedly-trustworthy seller’s listing.
“The new page makes it faster and easier for buyers to find the book, music, movie or game item they’re looking for from sellers they trust,” explains eBay’s Matt Olson in the announcement.
On the surface, this would appear to be a bonus for trustworthy sellers. The featured seller is selected by Best Match. Buyers might be happy to check out that featured seller, and the featured seller might be happy too, but all of those other sellers who consider themselves just as trustworthy as the featured one, but whose listings are pages away from the top, might be less thrilled.
“The new pages will give buyers very little incentive to move beyond the first page of search results, and that’s not going to be popular with many sellers who are already complaining about plummeting eBay sales,” explains Sue Bailey at TameBay.
eBay’s New Payment Options and the Fees for Sellers They Carry
As most ebay sellers are aware, the site switched to an online-only payment policy last year. Many saw this as a way for the company to make people pay with their own PayPal service. Recently they added a couple more services to the roster of payment options: Moneybookers and PayMate. The latter has now come out and announced some fees that it will charge ebay users to use PayMate.
“Buyers on eBay do not have to register with PayMate when paying for a transaction,” reports Ina Steiner at AuctionBytes. “PayMate charges eBay sellers who sign up for the service 3 percent plus 50 cents per transaction with no monthly or annual fee. There are no fees to withdraw funds into a bank account.” Paymate will become integrated into eBay’s checkout system beginning February 26th.
Seller fees for Moneybookers will be 2.9% plus 29 cents per transaction for monthly sales of up to $3,000; 2.4% plus 29 cents per transaction for monthly sales of between $3,000.01 and $10,000; 2.1% plus 29 cents per transaction for monthly sales of between $10,000.01 and $100,000; and 1.9% plus 29 cents per transaction for monthly sales over $100,000 according to Steiner. It has not been announced when Moneybookers will become integrated into eBay, but it is due to be sometime this month.
Breaking Up eBay
On another eBay-related note, Kevin Kelleher at GigaOm takes an interesting look at everything the company owns (right from the SEC’s list) and talks about why they should consider breaking some stuff up. It’s an interesting read for eBay followers.
